Archive for Sat February 23 13:05, 2008

This blogging system has a few warts in it. Most of the links to archives, categories, recent posts, and so forth will not work if you have certain themes installed. I thought it was a problem with mod_rewrite, and it turned out that the theme “cutline-3-column-split-11″ was completely hosing the URLs. (And the great battle to separate “functionality” from “how it looks” drags on.)

This talian-10 theme doesn’t seem to do that. However, it had some strange design decisions in it. Things that were marked italic or <em> were set up such that they’d be placed on a separate line and indented. Italics show up reasonably often; you have to emphasize things at times, or write about book titles. And when your italics break the page up, that makes it difficult to read. I don’t know why the theme author did things that way.

However, I’ve figured out how to make it not do that. And I’ve made the links blue, since I’m old-school enough to want all the links to be the same (default Netscape) color. Also put in additional image DIVs in the CSS so that the archive and search pages will have different images on them. It’s interesting that the cutline theme had that logic in the PHP header with an if-else chain, while talian-10 has separate PHP pages for “page”, “archive”, “category”, and so forth. TMTOWTDI–it’s not just for Perl anymore.

So now it’s time to get some theory in CSS now that I’ve had a little practical experience. “Theory first” just doesn’t work for me….